Geoff Mazeroff

Dates covered: May 13-19, 2019 (week 20 of 52)

Business

The Age of Continuous Connection (via Harvard Business Review)

This article suggests four strategies for using connectivity to enhance the customer experience that go beyond the “buy what we have” experience. The scenario is someone needs to finish printing some letters and is out of toner. “Buy what we have” means the customer drives to the store, tries to track down which of the toner cartridges he needs (where there are dozens), maybe the store is out of stock, etc. (Personal notes: None of these sounds all that novel, and some of them are borderline creepy.)

1. Respond to desire — visit a website, enter the printer model, and a delivery is made to the customer’s house the same day
2. Curated offer — same as before, but the vendor already knows what printer model the customer has
3. Coach behavior — the printer communicates toner status and has the company contact the customer before the toner runs out
4. Automatic execution — same as coaching, except the company sends the toner automatically

Consulting or con-$ulting (via The Software Mentor)

The author speculates on some things that likely happened between Hertz and Accenture in a botched $32M website that never materialized. Likely neither party came out clean.

What Western Marketers Can Learn from China (via Harvard Business Review)

I know little about marketing and international business, which made this article an interesting read. Western marketing is about profit; Chinese marketing is about revenue. Technologically, China had a different path than the US — they skipped the “PC” part of “PC to mobile.” Western marketing also seems to be about process and scalability, while Chinese marketing is about moving faster. (This reminded me of Agile.)

How to Attract Startups and Tech Companies to a City Without Relying on Tax Breaks (via Harvard Business Review)

1. Invest in institutions of higher education as engines of innovation and job creation, particularly leveraging their ability to attract international talent.
2. Foster diverse communities, utilizing untapped talent to drive higher economic returns as well as greater equity.
3. Build basic infrastructure to ensure future growth and to retain a highly-trained local workforce.

Career

Your “Dream Job” Is a Myth (via Gillie Hunt)

“It’s impossible to tell how perfect a position truly is until you’re in it.” This post has some examples of people describing dream jobs that turned out to be nightmares. The advice is that job seekers should look for “interesting possibilities” and “openings I’d like to learn more about” instead of chasing dream jobs or staying in positions they thought were their dream jobs.

Executive Ambitions (via Harvard Business Review)

Although it focuses on people aiming for the C-suite, there’s good career advice in this 30-minute podcast. Here are some of the notes I took:

• Desirable traits: empathy, someone people will follow, look for people smarter than you
• “Dress for the job you want, but perform the job you have.”
• Have a sense of where you want to go. What do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? Why are you aspiring to be at the top? What are you sacrificing to do that?
• Regarding the need to balance agency and loyalty (e.g., job hopping to grow in your career), we no longer have jobs in the traditional sense: We have networks and gigs.
• Your narrative should align with the job you’re applying for.
• “Competent people shouldn’t have to work for a company they don’t believe in.”
• “‘In difficulty lies opportunity’ is a cliche for a reason.” If you’ve tried to turn the ship around and are getting no support, it’s best to move on. The flip side could be a very high compensation or some other benefit such as a time with a big title.
• If you’re working in a zero-sum game situation, try to create a new game.

Culture

Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish? (via Harvard Business Review)

You may need to watch out for company cheers and behaviors that keep employees at work. “Do employees believe in the company’s vision because they understand and agree with it or because that’s what they’re supposed to do? Does the company encourage them to have personal lives? Most importantly, does it encourage the individuality and non-conformism that drive breakthroughs?”

Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech (via The Software Mentor)

The phrase seems to be a nice sentiment, but rarely works in practice. Leaders can add a degree of uncertainty (e.g., I’m 90% sure this tool will solve our problem), which invites participation.

Engagement around the World, Charted (via Harvard Business Review)

This post shares data from a 2019 ADP survey of global workers with regard to engagement. Two takeaways for me… (1) engagement seems to be correlated with being part of a team, (2) remote workers reported they are more engaged. The graph used to support the latter is titled “Working Remotely Boosts Engagement”; I’m calling shenanigans on this one. Replace “boosts” with “is correlated with” and you’d probably get closer to the truth. If the workplace has a first-class, remote-first culture, I would expect higher engagement. However, if the workplace has a on premises-first, remote-possible culture, I would expect lower engagement.

Leadership

7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success (via Harvard Business Review)

1. Understand their challenges — things will be unfamiliar, they don’t have the relationships, and need to adapt to new culture
2. Accelerate their learning — technical, cultural, political
3. Make them part of the team — help them build working relationships
4. Connect them with key stakeholders — not just their supervisor, but other folks that will help them be successful
5. Give them direction — What do they need to do? How should they go about doing it? Why should they feel motivated to accomplish it?
6. Help them get early wins
7. Coach them for success — don’t be too gentle, and don’t throw them in the deep end

What Good Feedback Really Looks Like (via Harvard Business Review)

This article is a counterpoint to a previous HBR article about feedback, showing that feedback is complex — there’s likely not one correct mechanism.

Process

How to Overcome the Bias We Have Toward Our Own Ideas (via Harvard Business Review)

In short, separate the generation of the ideas from those evaluating the merit of those ideas. The study mentioned in the article found that those higher up the org chart had more “valued” ideas, and ideas generated by groups were considered more valuable than those from individuals.

To Become Your Best Self, Study Your Successes (via Harvard Business Review)

• Notice positive feedback — write it down so you can reflect on it later
• Ask questions — get specific about why you received this feedback
• Study your successes
• Practice enacting your best self
• Pay it forward — give useful feedback to others

To Improve Food Inspections, Change the Way They’re Scheduled (via Harvard Business Review)

I argue that these suggestions can apply to any kind of review (peer review, inspection, etc.)

• The rigor of the inspection decreases over the day (fatigue, trying to complete work at a reasonable hour)
• Specific violations during one review correlate to finding the same violations at the next one

OPP (Other People’s Problems) (via Software Lead Weekly)

This post describes a workflow (and yes, there’s a flowchart at the end) of whether you should pick certain battles. (Note: The author, Camille Fournier, has written an excellent book with other advice and workflows called The Manager’s Path.)

Failure is Familiar, Safety is Surprising (via Software Lead Weekly)

It’s an interesting concept to think of success as the lack of failure (or safety as the lack of accidents). Success tends to be invisible, while failure gets quite a bit of attention. We also have varying degrees of failure, as systems can be designed to run in “degraded mode.”

Technology

Voice Recognition Still Has Significant Race and Gender Biases (via Harvard Business Review)

The use of voice-based technology is increasing; however, it seems to work best if the user is white and male.

Could a tattoo help you stay healthy? (via TED)

The magic is in dyes can respond to certain conditions humans don’t easily detect… UV light (making us aware if sunscreen is working), temperature (if our body temperature is too high or too low), and electricity (eventually being able to charge pacemakers and other biomedical implants).

Cryptography and PKI (via CompTIA Security+ Pluralsight path)

This refresher course covers basic cryptography concepts, cryptographic algorithms, configuring wireless security, and Public Key Infrastructure.

Machines that Speak and Write Will Make Misinformation Worse (via Harvard Business Review)

This seems like another example of machine learning amplifying things humans do that we’re not particularly proud of. I was pleased they mentioned Microsoft Tay as an example of a chatbot gone bad.